James Dolan, co-creator of SecureDrop, has died | Hacker News Reader

James Dolan, co-creator of SecureDrop, has died

freedom.press

461 pointsuptown77 comments

Does anyone know if James had taken a short hiatus between jobs to travel by motorcycle for a while in Southern California? I ran it someone one day at The Rock Store that had worked with Aaron Swartz and a friend and I had a great conversation with him and I’m now wondering whether it was James.

Yes, indeed he did! After leaving FPF, he unplugged for a while, taking a road trip on his bike. He spent a lot of time working on that bike.

The road trip was a great excuse to unwind after a lot of stressful security work. He ended up rejoining the industry—good luck stopping that guy from anything—and continued for many years helping other projects.

So, yes, it does sound like you were fortunate enough to cross paths with a terribly interesting individual. Cheers, in his honor.

Just when I clicked https://securedrop.org/, my company's corporate firewall blocked it. I can't start to imagine how much adversity the world has imposed onto these brave warriors.

Very nice tribute.

There was another piece* posted to HN today about how psychologically traumatic and life altering it can be to kill someone accidentally under circumstances where you couldn't have predicted it nor prevented it. Veterans are often deeply scarred by their wartime experiences and may not share them in order to protect other people from the horrors of war.

My father fought in both WW2 and Vietnam. He died in his late 80s. Only after his death did it occur to me that he told humorous stories about Vietnam, but never spoke of WW2. I infer that if Vietnam was joke worthy in his eyes, WW2 was unspeakable.

I wish we had a better track record for helping veterans with the mental health issues that so often grow out of serving their country.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105745

Is there any more information about this? I can't even find an article which says where he lived.

Good lord this is chilling. It makes me terribly sad to think about the mental torture some people go through that leads them to such an act.

Now we have two suicides of people working in this facet of human right activism. At what number should we start thinking about foul play? There are ways to push people to such extreme acts.

Two? Who's the other one?

Aaron Swartz, the other co-creator of SecureDrop.

Or two people, one being a known sufferer of depression and the other being known a a sufferer of PTSD, decided to kill themselves like an alarming number of people do who suffer from those problems. Maybe instead turning this into a story about government conspiracies and secret plots to kill citizens we try to turn this into a story about getting people with mental health issues the help they need.

> foul play

I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but this is bottom of the barrel stuff: off topic, disrespectful, and way below the quality line. Please don't bring it in here.

dang, nobody understands what you are talking about.

I am not nobody. And I suspect I'm not alone.

I understood perfectly what he's talking about, and I agree with him.

Suicide is very common. Suicide is more common in people who are male, and who are middle aged. There are also elements of "contagion" around suicde.

I'm really not familiar with SecureDrop or James Dolan's activism. Does anyone familiar with him want to summarize for me/us?

The article itself is a good summary of his work on SecureDrop.

Okay, I thought there was something more that I didn't know about! Thank you

In Memorian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programmers_who_commi...

really horrible, sorry to hear. awful loss for us all.

It’s terrible that he served our country and was thrown away. He is a true American and patriot.

Can any of the HN Admins set the title bar to black? IIRC, thats the custom for a "death in the family".

First Aaron Swartz, now James Dolan. Sad to see good people like them leave us. Hope they inspire some other wonderful people to follow their steps.

EDIT: Well, obviously not all their steps.

Well... maybe not all the steps.

I'll admit I thought this was a repost from years ago - this is just incredibly similar.

Anything can be funny given the right person saying it at the appropriate time in the right context

Seeing a suicide joke from a person I don't know in the Hacker News thread about the death an individual I respect an hour after it's been released is not my idea of funny.

I see it as a word of caution for the bright eyed. Fighting for your ideals wears on you, and some are more resilient to its demands than others.

I wonder if the personal trait to see problems and act is because the problems seem bigger or because the "activation threshold" of that person is lower. If the former, I could see that the same trait also makes it more likely that the problems feel overwhelming.

Ignorance is bliss.

People cope with death in different ways. Avoid taking things strangers say very seriously.

I am all about dark humor, and it's true when dealing with death, there's no accounting for taste, but thanks for posting this. It's a very clear and sober comment, it doesn't admonish the parent, but shares how the comment made you feel. That is completely and totally appropriate and HN could use a lot more of this.

Humor is how many people cope with loss/sadness/etc.

Why did you immediately assume the post was a joke about suicide, rather than a clever and witty remark about the dangers of following your passions/ideals in the face of enormous opposition and psychological torment?

Because the post was a joke about suicide.

Let us not forget Ian Murdock, and all the others lesser well known.

Len Sassaman

Heroes die young.

Why is the date of the post "Tomorrow"?

Probably a buggy publishing system that rounds date/time, or something similar. It says "Today" for me.

Or a major conspiracy. My money's with Occam's razor, though.

Says today for me, maybe something to do with timezones?

I had to research a bit as I recall an identical story about JStor and a computer programmer from a few years ago.

http://business.time.com/2013/01/14/mit-orders-review-of-aar...

Seems incredibly similar to this situation and on both accounts this is terribly sad to see.

Yes, Aaron Swartz is mentioned 6 times in the article above.

Yeah I guess I just couldn't believe what I was reading that two people so closely related to each other could have the same outcome. It's just staggering news and quite hard to comprehend.

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